External RAID

iirc, you can plug in a few firewire drives and then use the disk utility to set them up as a RAID.

 

If you want a more complete/user-friendly RAID Software package try SoftRAID. There's a trial version of it available to test. It's at:

http://www.softRAID.com/

It is very flexible if you want to attach FW drives/USB 2.0 drives/ SMART drives (like those found here: http://www.granitedigital.com/catalog/pg33_firewireidehotswapjbodraid_.htm

As someone else mentioned AppleRAID works as well. Here's a sheet of the differences:

http://www.softRAID.com/vsapple.html

Hope that helps a bit~

 

You can buy various PCI SATA cards that can have external SATA plugs, and a way to route the molex eternally. So you'd still have internal hard drives, but they could be sitting outside of the machine, if you're in to that sort of thing.

 

Couple of options

accusys makes a variety of internal and external RAID devices that can be connected via FireWire, USB, or SATA.

These are hardware based RAIDs, for no particular OS or software is needed. They come in RAID 0, 1, and 5 configurations, so depending what your pocketbook allows, you can choose.

If you want something a bit cheaper, you can get RAID5 software from FWB, or use the RAID 0 or RAID 1 features in OSX. These all will cause a minor to major performance hit on your CPU depending on what processor you use.

Finally, if you are looking just for cases ( SATA / USB / FireWire ), I have had particularly good luck with cases from bytecc .

These have been pretty reliable, and stack well. Pricewatch.com caries the FW versions for about $45.

I hope this helps,

Max.

 

You might be interested in reading this article from bare feats:

http://www.barefeats.com/fire36b.html

Go hardcore with a PCI Firewire 800 card, and get 3 more 1394a slots while you're at it.

http://www.firewiredirect.com/firewire/products/adapters_pci800.shtml

You could pair this up with an external RAID firewire 800 unit and it'd be hella nice.

http://www.firewiredirect.com/firewire/products/RAID_V800.shtml